Catherine Barkley’s Wartime Nursing Service in A Farewell to Arms 197 Twentieth-Century Literature 62.2 June 2016 197 © 2016 Hofstra University DOI 10.1215/10.1215/0041462X-3616588 In Uniform Code: Catherine Barkley’s Wartime Nursing Service in A Farewell to Arms Michelle N. Huang With scientiic precision, I studied the memoirs of Blunden, Sassoon, and Graves. Surely, I thought, my story is as interesting as theirs. Besides, I see things other than they have seen, and some of the things they perceived, I see diferently. —Vera Brittain, Testament of Experience When former Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse Vera Brittain began penning her own account of World War I, Testament of Youth (1933), she studied the writing of disillusioned soldier-poets such as Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves. While Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), the foundational text of World War I literary scholarship, argues that these soldiers were the agents of modernism, Brittain’s close study of the male memoirs served to conirm that her exper ience as a war nurse was fundamentally diferent from that of a soldier, not only in practical duty but also in perspective and style. 1 Testament of Youth chronologically traces Brittain’s engagement with the war, beginning with her joining the nursing service at the same time her brother and iancé enlisted in the army. 2 Through her description of the horrors of wartime hospitals, the deaths of her iancé and brother in combat, and her alienating return to civil society, Brittain shows that war’s efects were not conined to the front lines.The Great War rendered both the young men and the young women of the time a “lost generation” crushed in numbers and jaded in spirit. Recent feminist recovery eforts have restored critical attention to the essential work nurses like Brittain contributed to the war efort. 3 However, these examinations almost Twentieth-Century Literature Published by Duke University Press